Some Google Belgium Follow-Ups
Just a quick note that Google’s posted on its official blog about the Google
Belgian news issue that I’ve been covering, while William Slawski has a nice
translation in the works on the ruling itself.
About the Google News case in
Belgium from the Official Google Blog doesn’t really provide much new
information that you haven’t already gotten in reports from me and others. What
should it provide? How about answers to:
The post does stress that there are ways for publishers to easily stay out of
Google. Those ways don’t appear to have been presented to the court itself.
Writes William Slawski in Belgian
Copyright Ruling Against Google News:
I’m surprised by the lack of mentions of the use of a noarchive meta tag or
noindex meta tags or by the use of robots.txt to disallow Google from indexing
or archiving the pages of the newpapers in question.While the Court does note that the onus of keeping copyright from being
infringed falls upon the owner of the technology used to take text from the
newspapers in question, this seems like an omission worth noting.Regardless of how the Court may have felt about those options, I think that
they should have been addressed in some manner. The failure to do so makes it
appear that they either weren’t provided information about those by their
expert, or didn’t understand them, or may not have addressed those issues on
purpose.A simple noarchive tag would have kept information on those pages from
being cached by Google. A noindex tag or disallow directive should have kept
their pages from being indexed at all by Google. Were they using these and
Google ignored them? I suspect that they weren’t.
After some more analysis, including an important argument over whether Google
is a portal competing with newspapers or a search engine (answer, in my view,
probably both depending on whether you keyword search Google News or read by
browsing), he provides a long and what seems fairly complete English translation
of the French-language
ruling.
For more background on the case, see my prior posts: